(Yes, so it’s come to this – I picked up a book on menopause.)

This was a disappointment. I thought that “Mayo Clinic” would indicate something of more heft. I want to know why I am getting headaches. I want to know how estrogen affects the vascular system. What about the effects of long-term oral contraceptive use on menopause?

Instead, it’s mostly a 3000-foot view of things that might be happening to you, but little “why” or “how.” Lots of stuff about aging in general that you might find in a throwaway newspaper advice column. An entire weight loss chapter with things I’m sure you NEVER thought of, like eating more fiber and avoiding sugary drinks. For this I bought a book by the Mayo Clinic.

by Zeke Faux

I enjoyed it. It was a nice counterpoint to Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite – some of the details are identical, right down to the chickpea korma SBF apparently liked for lunch. But SBF wasn’t truly the focus. The focus was Tether. He kept waiting for Tether to self-destruct, and it never really did. Except, of course, that everything kinda did.

Epilogue: “The technology was as old as WhatsApp or Uber, which had long since wormed their way into our everyday lives so thoroughly their nanmes had become verbs. But no one had invented a mainstream use for cryptocurrency. So many smart people had spent so many thousands of hours working on crypto – and yet shockingly little use had come of it.” Count me among them, I guess, for those dreamlike 10 months I spent at TechLab.

by Ursula Parrott

Extra-marital sex. Abortion. Substance abuse. Skepticism about the sexual revolution, and how it sure seems to just screw over women.

Is it the 1960s? The 1970s? No – it’s 1925.

Definitely a fascinating look at sex and the (newly) single girl and the city back in your grandmother’s day. It starts with our protagonist’s husband’s exit, and has a very nice twist of an ending, but the middle was too long and made me very impatient with Patricia’s endless, mindless promiscuity. And I wish the heroine could have been given a bit more going for her besides her looks – that got very tiring to read about too. I was super sick of hearing about her “creamy” shoulders, and super sick of every man she met gushing over her beauty.

Good lines:

“New York’s a jail to which, once committed, the sentence is for life; but it is such a well-furnished jail, one does not mind much.”

“Great Lovers – men who’ve known a hundred women, and boast of it – they remind me of the man who wanted to be a musician and so took one lesson on each instrument in the orchestra… He couldn’t play a tune on any of them in the end.”